ARM's colaboration with TSMC has finally born some fruit with the tapeout of a 10nm test chip to show off the company's readiness for the new manufacturing process.

The new test chip contains ARM's yet-to-be-announced "Artemis" CPU core which is named after a goddess who will turn you into deer and tear you apart with wild dogs if you ever see her. [The NDA must have been pretty tough on this chip.ed]

In fact things have been ticking along on this project for ages. ARM discloses that tapeout actually took place back in December last year and is expecting silicon to come back from the foundry in the following weeks.

ARM actually implemented a full four-core Artemis cluster on the test chip which should show vendors what is possible for their production designs. The test chip has a current generation Mali GPU implementation with 1 shader core to show vendors what they will get when they use ARM's POP IP in conjunction with its GPU IP. There is also a range of other IP blocks and I/O interfaces that are used to validation of the new manufacturing process.

TSMC's 10FF manufacturing process is supposed to increase density with scalings of up to 2.1x compared to the previous 16nm manufacturing node. It also brings about 11-12 per cent higher performance at each process' respective nominal voltage, or a 30 per cent reduction in power.

ARM siad that comparing a current Cortex A72 design on 16FF+ and an Artemis core on 10FF on the new CPU and process can halve the dynamic power consumption. Currently clock frequencies on the new design are still behind the older more mature process and IP, but ARM expects this to improve as it optimises its POP and the process stabilises.

ARM has announced a new mobile graphics chip, the Mali-DP650 which it said was designed to handle 4K content a device's screen and on an external display.

The new Mali GPU can push enough pixels on the local display it is more likely that it is interested in using the technology for streaming.

Many smartphones can record 4K video and this means that smartphones could be a home to high resolution content which can be streamed to a large, high resolution screen.

It looks like Mali DP650can juggle the device's native resolution and the external display's own resolution and the variable refresh rates. At least that is what ARM says it can do.

The GPU is naturally able to handle different resolutions but it is optimized for a "2.5K", which means WQXGA (2560x1600) on tablets and WQHD (2560x1440) on smartphones, but also Full HD (1920x1080) for slightly lower end devices.

"Smartphones and tablets are increasingly becoming content passports, allowing people to securely download content once and carry it to view on whichever screen is most suitable. The ability to stream the best quality content from a mobile device to any screen is an important capability ARM Mali display technology delivers."

ARM did not say when the Mali-DP650 will be in the shops or which chips will be the first to incorporate its split-display mode feature.

Fudzilla can confirm that MediaTek has signed up its new Helio P10 for more than 100 devices and that the company has won more than 100 design wins.

Fudzilla had a chance to meet with quite a few people from MediaTek management and talk about the trends and products of 2016. CJ (Ching-Jiang) Hsieh Vice Chairman & President of MediaTek, Johan Erik Lodenius Vice President & Chief Marketing Officer and Kristin Taylor a Vice President in charge of Industry Analyst Relations exclusively told us that the Helio P10 had been well received by the industry.

Hsieh confirmed that there will be 100 phones coming with Helio P10. There will be many Helio X20 phones too but he didn’t give a number. It looks like that Helio P10 will ship first, with Helio X20 following shortly after. The company sent us an update on the number and it turns out that some of these 100 design wins will continue to use Helio X10 processor. It seems that Helio X10 in 2016 becomes a mainstream solution and it will co-exist with P10 designs.

Some of these phones should show up in Q1 2016 but this depends on MediaTek customer schedules. The SoC’s have been shipping since Q4 2015 and it looks like that the phones are just about to start shipping.

There should be 50 different OEMs working on the phones and the company didn’t want to pre-announce any of them. We heard that there will be some big brand designs coming with P10. It is safe to assume that most of that number will be affordable Chinese phone manufacturers.

The P10 comes with eight cores, new 28 nm HP+ manufacturing process and brand new CAT 6 Modem and should be good solution for the mainstream. The new Mali T860 MP2 at 700 MHz with eight core Cortex A53 at 2.0 GHz should also make quite an impression for this market. Let’s just wait for the first design win for that one..

A year ago Fudzilla revealed that Samsung has been building a mobile GPU. We are still as puzzled about it now as we were then, but there are more confirmations that they should finish it in the 2017 – 2018 timeframe.

The details are slim but the report claims Samsung want to unite its Eyxnos CPU with its own GPU. The main goal is to become competitive in the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) system market. It is believed that this might become a big thing in the longer term. The original plan was to deliver the GPU much earlier, but it looks like the plans were significantly delayed.

Some of you might remember Intel Larrabee, that Hamlet of discrete graphics that was supposed "to bee" for years before it was declared "not to bee." Making a GPU from scratch is extremely hard as making all the drivers is the programming job from hell.

Samsung's own GPU will probably find its way by 2017 or 2018 which is a long time in computing. The Exynos 7420 processor uses Mali-T760 MP8 graphics and there are indications that the next generation Exynos expected in 2016 will use the Mali-T860 and T880.

Samsung needs to stay competitive as the Qualcomm and MediaTek made more noise about having the GPU and CPU that work together to speed up tasks. Not even Apple has its own GPU. Apple used PowerVR for years while the Qualcomm had its own Adreno graphics.

MediaTek started using latest Mali T860 for its Helio P10 (6755) mainstream / performance SoC while the Helio X20 is using the yet to be named Mali-based graphics. Nvidia with its Geforce mobile seems to be the fastestfor tablets and console use while Adreno 530 looks like a top performer.

ARM’s next-generation Mali-T880 GPU is coming next year, with the new Cortex-A72 CPU core, and the company is now shedding more light on the design.

ARM promises an 80% performance uplift compared to the Mali-T760, with 40% better power efficiency.

ARM Mali-T880 reserved for high-end SoCs

However, the Mali-T880 won’t be a direct successor to the current Mali-T760, which is used in a number of Samsung and MediaTek SoCs.

The Mali-T860 should take care of this market, and ARM says the GPU is designed for “best performance for lowest energy consumption”. Tom’s Hardware speculates that the Mali-T860 will debut in devices like the Galaxy Note 5, with the Mali-T880 arriving later, possibly in the next generation Exynos, used in the Galaxy S7.

Both the Mali-T860 and Mali-T880 are expected to appear on next generation ARM-designs, which are coming next year, on FinFET nodes in 14nm and 16nm. These chips are expected to sport big Cortex-A72 cores, in some cases backed by frugal Cortex-A53 cores in a big.LITTLE configuration.

Mali-T830 and Mali-T820 go after the low end

The Mali-T830 and Mali-T820 are designed for lower-end devices. Both are designed to offer as much performance as possible from a “minimal silicon area,” but the Mali-T820 should be the slower and more efficient of the two.

There is still not a lot of info on the Mali-T830 and Mali-T820, but we expect to see them on cheap and small quad-core Cortex-A53 SoCs.

As for the top end Mali-T880, OEMs will be free to use up to 16 cores, twice as many as on the Mali-T760. We still do not know if the Mali-T820 and Mali-T830 are as configurable as their bigger siblings, but it’s likely that they are.

Samsung is trying to make a GPU for years and enter this already crowded GPU IP market. Qualcomm uses Adreno, Nvidia uses Geforce and wants to license it to others. Apple uses PowerVR while Mediatek uses ARM owed Mali graphics for newer processors while using PowerVR for some older parts. Intel is using PowerVR G6430 for its mobile processors such as Atom Z3580 Moorefield while AMD has its own graphics that it can use for future SoCs and APUs. Intel owns Intel HD graphics that dominates the integrated CPU market especially for notebooks.

Samsung currently uses Mali graphics but this might change. If its team is successful, it might come with its own graphics and jack them under the bonnet of its own Exynos processor by the next summer.

Samsung is trying to get into Nvidia space and the company doesn’t like it. Even if Samsung manages to make a successful GPU, the competition is hard. Even with years of trying Samsung is mostly using Exynos for its own tablets and some phones. Most Samsung high end phones use Qualcomm Snapdragons as these tend to have better LTE modems and are widely available.

According to the Korean ZDnet the company might talk about the GPU as early as February at the Solid Circuits Society (ISSCC) conference with the official announcement scheduled for summer 2015.

In some benchmarks Nvidia’s Tegra K1 can push significantly more polygons that Qualcomm’s Adreno 420, but it is still unclear which one will end up faster. Both GPUs are DirectX 11 feature set compatible. Adreno supports Open GL 3.1 that is bringing a tessellation to the mobile world.

Since Tegra K1 has a Kepler core, it comes with full Open GL 4.4 including the tessellation support. Naturally apart from the face demo that looks awesome and very lifelike, we saw a tessellation demo.

We saw some demos of Adreno 420 and we saw that the insect demo pushes up to 270.000 polygons, the number that might impress some. At Nvidia booth we saw Nvidia demo of tessellation on Tegra K1 and this time we saw up to 700.000 polygons rendered when needed. We were told by Nvidia representatives that we can expect some that Tegra K1 can render between 500 and one million polygons a second, which sounds like a lot.

We cannot say whether Adreno guys pushed the 420 to the limit nor do we know which one will end up faster. None of the companies actually revealed real performance numbers that we could measure against the previous generation chips or against each other.

Nvidia and Qualcomm didn’t talk about the shipping date for the devices based on these chips but we hope to see designs in first half of the year from both. Adreno 420 and Tegra K1 will also have to take on Imagination’s PowerVR 6-series parts and new ARM Mali GPUs and the mobile GPU space in 2014 will be quite interesting to watch.

Imagination is the elephant in the room, but adoption of Rogue GPUs has been rather slow over the last few months.

ARM has announced a couple of new mobile GPUs in the form of the Mali T720 and Mali 760. The new GPUs boast improved efficiency and a fourfold increase in performance over the old Mali T604.

The Mali T760 is designed for high end devices, while the T720 is aimed for “high-growth” markets, i.e. mid-range SoCs. Lead licensees for the new GPUs include MediaTek, Rockchip and LG.

The T760 can even be used in HPC environments and it can scale to 16 cores, while the old Mali T678 could only deal with eight cores. Performance per core was improved as well and it’s should end up 400 percent faster than the T604. It will initially target TSMC’s 28nm HPM process and eventually 16nm FinFET.

The T720 is a cost-optimized solution for entry-level and mid-range devices. It’s 150 percent more efficient than the Mali 400, its die area was reduced by about 30 percent, while performance is 50 percent higher than previous generation low-end ARM GPUs.

Imagination Technologies, the producer of PowerVR GPUs used in heaps of SoC designs, is still the world’s leading supplier of mobile GPUs, according to Jon Peddie Research. Imagination took the lead when it started providing GPUs for Apple and it never looked back. The new Apple A7 SoC is the first chip to use the company’s new Rogue 6-series GPU and it won’t be the last.

However, Imagination has lost a bit of ground since last year. Its market share in the first half of 2012 was a whopping 52 percent, but a year later it was down to 37.6 percent. Things should improve for Imagination as more Rogue designs appear.

As a result or Imagination’s dip, Qualcomm and ARM muscled in to seize more share over the last year. Qualcomm’s GPU share went up from 29.3 to 32.3 percent, while ARM saw an even bigger gain – going from 13.5 to 18.4 percent in the same period.

Nvidia was the biggest loser. Its share dropped from 4.9 percent to just 1.4 percent over the last year. Since Nvidia doesn’t license its GPUs, the number indicates a steep shipment in Tegra SoCs, which comes as no surprise.

The biggest winner, however, was not ARM or Qualcomm. It was Vivante, which had an 0.3 share last year, but ended the first half of 2013 with a 9.8 share. Vivante IP is used in a growing number of SoCs, but the company doesn’t get much coverage as most of its clients are focused at non-consumerish, embedded markets

Vivante currently provides GPU tech for Marvell, Freescale, Rockchip and Vivante's latest consumer design win we can think of is Google’s Chromecast, which packs a Marvell DE3005 SoC and Vivante GC1000 graphics. You can check out a list of Vivante's design wins here.

What’s in store for the second half of the year and beyond?

We believe Imagination will rebound with Rogue and Nvidia has a chance to make up some lost ground as more T4/T4i designs emerge. However, when Nvidia starts licensing Maxwell IP to other SoC builders, it could gain share overnight. Furthermore, if that triggers a response from AMD we could see the old green-red rivalry extend to the mobile space and who wouldn't want to see that happen? (Imagination, ARM, Qualcomm, Vivante. Ed)

Also, here’s an interesting statistic. The market for SoCs with GPUs grew 81 percent from the first half of 2011.

ARM has been on a roll for years, with its chips powering millions of mobile devices shipped every day. However, although ARM is usually associated with ARM-based CPUs, the company has quite a presence in mobile graphics as well.

Roughly 150 million SoCs with ARM Mali graphics inside shipped last year, up from 50 million in 2011. This year the number is expected to hit 240 million, a fivefold increase in just three years. However, although it dominates the mobile processor market, ARM is facing tough competition in the market space, namely from Imagination, Qualcomm (Adreno) and to some extent Nvidia.

Mali GPUs are currently used in more than 70 percent of digital TVs and 50 percent of Android tablets. The share in mobile phones is much lower – just 20 percent. With smartphone shipments projected to hit 1.1 billion units in 2013, ARM is looking at very good year indeed, with or without graphics.